Canva Scores Guy Kawasaki As Product Evangelist

Good news for the design startup Canva. The company managed to get Guy Kawasaki to step back into the Chief Evangelist role after a near two decades absence. His last evangelist role was for Apple in the late 90s. Since then, he has founded Alltop – a site aggregator – and has spent time promoting other entrepreneurs.

Canva is hoping to use Guy’s connections as the company looks to expand globally. The core business is a collaboration tool for designers that uses a drag and drop interface, and access to a million plus graphics, fonts and images. The company is already backed with $3 million, and has 320,000 designers onboard with over one million designs created.

Guy Kawasaki released a statement on his new position. “Macintosh democratized computers; Google democratized information; and eBay democratized commerce. In the same way, Canva democratizes design,” Kawasaki said in a statement. “You don’t get many chances to democratize an industry, so I seized the opportunity to work for Canva.”

Canva hailed its coup in its statement. “In seven months, people have created more than 1.5 million designs using Canva. We’re incredibly excited to welcome Guy onboard as Canva’s Chief Evangelist,” Canva CEO Melanie Perkins said. “It’s an amazing endorsement of the Canva vision to have someone of his caliber join our team.

It will need someone with high visibility. The creative SaaS startups are going up against the 800 pound gorilla that is Adobe Cloud. With the company already making an impact on the creative space, it’s good news for designers that want to see faster innovation and tools tailored to their industry.